To Play or not to Play

In August 1984, Sri Lanka’s opening batsmen emerged from the venerable members’ stand at Lord’s to commence their country’s inaugural Test match in England – an epic moment in a long cricket history. Even as they did so, a group of half a dozen demonstrators burst from over the fence, and followed them to the centre waving banners. They proceeded to lie on the pitch, from which, in due course, they were unceremoniously hauled.

They were members of Sri Lanka’s ethnic minority Tamils, protesting the persecution of their community a year earlier during vicious attacks nominally independent of but in truth actively fomented by the country’s government. As many as 3000 Tamils were killed during the pogroms of Black July, in retaliation for an attack on military personnel at Thirunelveli by separatist guerillas from the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The Marylebone members spluttered their annoyance as the miscreants were led away, and sat down to enjoy their Test match – not much, as it happens, for Sri Lanka had much the better of a draw. For Sri Lankans, however, it was a reflection of what was already a quotidian reality. In his much-lauded MCC Spirit of Cricket Address last year, Kumar Sangakkara referred to Black July as among his earliest memories, his family’s protection of Tamil friends being seen through a child’s eyes.

‘I recollect the race riots of 1983 now with horror, but for the simple imagination of a child not yet six it was a time of extended play and fun,’ recalled Sangakkara. ‘I do not say this lightly as about 35 of our closest friends, all Tamils, took shelter in our home. They needed sanctuary from vicious politically-motivated goon squads and my father, like many other brave Sri Lankans from different ethnic backgrounds, opened his houses at great personal risk.For me, though, it was a time where I had all my friends to play with all day long. The schools were closed and we’d play sport for hour after hour in the backyard – cricket, football, rounders…it was a child’s dream come true. I remember getting annoyed when agame would be rudely interrupted by my parents and we’d all be ushered inside, hidden upstairs with our friends and ordered to be silent as the goon squads started searching homes in our neighbourhood. I did not realise the terrible consequences of my friends being discovered…’

The events of 1983 are usually regarded as the origin of the Civil War which raged off and on for more than a quarter of a century at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. The LTTE was only one of a number of organisations purporting to represent the interests of Tamils, who account for a bit more than a tenth of Sri Lanka’s people, but it set a bloodthirsty standard; the Sri Lankan military, and the Indian when it intervened on one side then the other, was scarcely less sanguinary. After the election of President Mahinda Rajapaksa seven years ago, the military waged a ruthlessly punitive campaign on Tamil enclaves in their island’s north and east; it is widely is reported to have shaded into cruelty, and even involved war crimes. The veracity of graphic footage contained in last year’s Channel 4 documentary Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields is disputed, but Australia’s senate endorsed it last year as ‘further shocking evidence supporting allegations of war crimes committed during the 2009 civil conflict in Sri Lanka’ , which it argued should be ‘investigated and verified.’ As Trevor Grant from the Refugee Action Collective reports in The Age today, there is also evidence of continued persecution of Sri Lanka’s Tamil community. His group is calling for the cessation of cricket contact between Australia and Sri Lanka until such time as the aforementioned allegations are wholeheatedly and satisfactorily probed; it will protest peacefully at the venues of the three Tests, Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney. Similar calls were made by the Tamil community in London last year.

It would be presumptuous to take sides in this dispute. But it is also true that when cricket teams take the field beneath the colours of the nations they hale from, they don’t only acquire stature and authority; they become indirect heir to all aspects of a country’s reputation. When Tamil Muttiah Muralitharan was Sri Lanka’s bowling star, he acted as a touchstone of unity; now he has retired, leaving Angelo Mathews as the sole prominent cricket Tamil, it might be felt to savour of exclusion. For Sri Lanka, this effect is compounded by the fact that Sri Lanka Cricket, the national governing body, is registered and supervised by Sri Lanka’s government under Sports Law No. 25 of 1973, including in the matter of selection; an entailment of this is an argument that the Sri Lankan cricket team is at least a quasi-official arm of the state.

The International Cricket Council last year foreshadowed a requirement that national cricket boards disentangle themselves from governments as far as possible, before more predictable shilly-shallying. Sri Lanka Cricket has recently submitted itself to a governance review by former ICC chief executive Haroon Lorgat, and introduced semblances of democracy to its activities. But decades of financial mismanagement, aggravated by overinvestment in infrastructure for last year’s World Cup, have left SLC dependent on the government as a lender of last resort; there is no reason to expect a separation of sporting powers soon. In his moving speech to MCC last year, Sangakkara concluded: ‘Cricket played a crucial role during the dark days of Sri Lanka’s civil war, a period of enormous suffering for all communities, but the conduct and performance of the team will have even greater importance as we enter a crucial period of reconciliation and recovery, an exciting period where all Sri Lankans aspire to peace and unity.’ But what unites us also has a capacity to divide.

Your Comments

Gideon, I’m not so sure we should be conflating politics and sports. Imagine if Olympics participation were to be only accorded to those countries whose political leaders were acceptable (to whom?).
It is particularly fraught even in the small pond of international cricket - Zimbabwe, Pakistan, etc.
The reason I write, however, is that I fail to understand how the travails of Sri Lanka can have been ongoing for 37 years if it is generally accepted that they commenced in 1983.

Gideon HaighTue 11 Dec 12 (06:26pm)

Sorry Warren, that could be clearer: 37 years spans the period from the foundation of the LTTE in 1975 to the present.

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